IBM Ships 10,000th Storage Virtualization Engine

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it has shipped its 10,000th storage virtualization engine -- SAN Volume Controller (SVC) -- to Able Body Labor, a mid-sized business in Florida, who will use SVC to be a differentiator in improving their infrastructure, increasing storage utilization, and at the same time helping to lower energy costs. In just over four years since its introduction, IBM now has 10,000 SAN Volume Controller engines running in more than 3,400 installations.

IBM has also announced today that it is making the next generation of its SVC system -- version 4.2.1 -- generally available. This version will have enhanced FlashCopy and dramatically improved supported storage capacity -- technology enhancements designed to speed data replication and extend the benefits of storage virtualization to even larger customer environments.

“IBM has been delivering virtualization capabilities for more than 40 years and today we unveil a milestone in the area of data storage virtualization with the shipment of 10,000 storage virtualization engines -- a fact no other storage company in the world can claim,” said Kelly Beavers, Director, Storage Software, IBM. “By working across multiple platforms, IBM’s storage virtualization helps to lower energy costs and unlocks the proprietary hold that other storage vendors have had on customers for years -- which IBM believes makes storage virtualization the killer application in the storage industry over the next decade.”

SVC helps improve flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures, such as creating a single virtual pool of information across the enterprise, enabling IT departments to respond more quickly to business needs and manage resources more flexibly. Benefits including increased resiliency, better application availability, simplified data migrations, and improved resource utilization can all be achieved through storage virtualization and these benefits are increased further when SVC is coupled with server virtualization such as through IBM System p LPARs and VMware ESX Server.

IBM’s storage virtualization helps to unlock the proprietary hold that vendors such as EMC, HP and Hitachi have had on customers for years. With IBM SVC, customers can choose any combination of supported EMC, IBM, HP, Hitachi or other devices, virtualize them, and manage and deploy them easily and with greater flexibility and independence than ever before.

10,000th SVC Engine Customer
Able Body Labor is one of the fastest growing privately owned staffing companies in the country. The Able Body family of companies maintains a diversified portfolio of staffing solutions.

Able Body Labor, Preferable Staffing, Infinity Staffing, Fuerza Laboral, Provide Staff, Brooks 55 Labor, and TrainingU are all designed to meet the dynamic needs of their client base. With 160 offices in twenty states and 750 full time employees, Able Body is poised to become a major US provider of temporary and temporary to permanent employees.

Over an infrastructure of entry level and mid-range storage solutions, IBM Business Partner Champion Solutions Group is working with Able Body Labor to deploy IBM SAN Volume Controller to more efficiently manage pools of storage and multiple SAN fabrics.

“Storage virtualization is a huge differentiator for maximizing infrastructures, getting full utilization, and at the same time lowering energy costs,” said Paul Zimorski, CIO, Able Body Labor. “Our organization needs to be able to access information very quickly while at the same time truly use the full value of the storage infrastructure we have in place -- and storage virtualization and IBM’s SAN Volume Controller solution is going to do that for us.”

Next Generation of IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller Software
IBM is making the next generation of SVC generally available today. SVC 4.2.1. will have Incremental FlashCopy, Cascaded FlashCopy, and a 4X improvement in the maximum supported storage -- going from 2 petabytes to 8 petabytes. These enhancements will help enable customers to enjoy improved speed when creating backup copies, improved replication flexibility, and the ability to experience the benefits of SVC in even larger storage configurations. SVC 4.2.1 support will be provided for new operating environments with VMware ESX Server: Red Hat and SUSE Linux, and Novell Netware.

Recent Highlights
Among some of the recent industry highlights in 2007 for IBM’s SAN Volume Controller:

* According to the independent industry organization, Storage Performance Council, IBM’s SAN Volume Controller is the fastest benchmarked storage virtualization solution in the world today, with speeds over 75 percent above its predecessor (1);
* According to a recent IDC report, in Q207 IBM achieved double digit year-over-year revenue growth in the storage software, growing fastest and gaining the most revenue share of the top three vendors. This marks the tenth consecutive quarter that IBM Storage Software had equal-or-above- market average revenue growth (2);
* IBM SVC is one of the technology solutions included in Project Big Green, which IBM announced in May 2007. Project Big Green features new and existing energy efficient products and services along with a plan to sharply reduce data center energy consumption for IBM and its customers.
* A study of SVC customers by Forrester Consulting found that SVC can help improve storage utilization by as much as 30 percent and helps reduce storage growth by as much as 20 percent (3);
* IBM’s storage virtualization solution was certified in October for VMware Infrastructure.

Storage virtualization is a key component of IBM’s Information on Demand, Green Data Center and IT Optimization strategies. The enhanced IBM SAN Volume Controller -- SVC 4.2.1 -- will be generally available starting today, November 16, 2007. More information can be found here: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/news/center/virtualization/